Welcome to Hurray for Food! My name is Steve. I’m a self-taught cook from Bremerton Washington. I created this blog to share delicious recipes that support physical and mental health.
I love food, and believe that it has a big impact on our overall quality of life. Great food can bring joy into our lives, help prevent chronic diseases, boost immunity, and help maintain brain health. Food matters.
Delicious
I have enjoyed food since high school. I was always on the lookout for restaurants with unique, flavorful foods such as great pizza, Mexican food, philly cheesesteaks, and unique burgers. I started cooking my own spaghetti, scrambled eggs, and tacos when I was 14.
While in college, I became interested in the cajun and creole foods of New Orleans. It was so flavorful and different from standard American fare.
One trip to New Orleans turned my interest into an obsession. I picked up a copy of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen [affiliate link], and fell in love with gumbo, jambalaya, chicken tchoupitoulas, shrimp diane, and bread pudding. I’ve learned a great deal about cooking from this book.
Throughout my life, I continued to seek unique and flavorful foods, discovering Greek, Indian, Hawaiian, Mediterranean, and Vietnamese foods along the way.
One day I heard about Science & Cooking from Harvard on EdX and decided to enroll. I’ve been a math/science guy all my life, and learning how ingredients and cooking techniques create the foods that I loved was a life changer. I found sous vide cooking, and fermentation (which is no longer part of the course) particularly interesting.
Nutrition
I’ve been interested in nutrition most of my life. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother when I was growing up. She read Prevention magazine, and we followed a lot of recommendations from it such as eating whole wheat bread, fresh made peanut butter. We even tried a smoothie-like shake made with wheat germ and brewers yeast that tasted horrible.
Nutrition has become increasingly important to me lately. I’m getting up there in years, and have had moderately high blood pressure for years. I recently started caring for my mom who shows signs of dementia and suffers from other chronic health issues. Witnessing my mom’s condition has also motivated me to try to maintain my own physical and cognitive health.
Research has increasingly recognized the impact of food on health. It has shown that a healthy diet can:
- Lower the risk of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and certain cancer;
- Reduce the risk of infections, and illnesses;
- Help maintain cognitive and mental health.
Beyond its physical health benefits, food can bring joy, and bring people together, which is great for our mental well-being too.
While searching for ways to help care for my mom’s cognitive issues, I discovered the MIND diet, a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH diets, which was specifically designed to slow cognitive decline. It has also has also been shown to support healthy aging and cardiovascular health, including lowering blood pressure. I believe that the MIND, Mediterranean and DASH diets are good guidelines, and try to make recipes are can be part of them.
Good and Good For You
While nutrition is important to me, I don’t think that we should underestimate the value of flavor. Our food choices are often driven by impulse rather than logic, and good tasting, convenient food will beat out nutritional food almost every time. Delicious food is also a source of joy, and sharing it with friends and family can support social wellness both of which are beneficial.
I try to use the knowledge that I’ve gained in nutrition, and food science to create healthy recipes for the foods that I love without sacrificing great taste.